Tuesday, 8 November 2011

Written on the body

The artist Alison Watt could hardly have found a more apt title for her latest exhibition, opening today in Edinburgh. Hiding in Full View is a portrait of humanity, in all its tender beauty and sadness, and yet not a single painted image of the human face can be seen on the walls of the Ingleby Gallery.

The show is a collaboration between Watt and the poet Don Paterson, and has grown out their joint meditation on the life and work of Francesca Woodman, whose elusive self-portrait, taken as a 13-year-old, is one of the first pictures in the exhibtion.

It is, as Watts says, an extraordinary and mysterious photograph. It shows Woodman sitting on a bench, her face obscured by her hair, as she reaches out to pull a chord and close the shutter of the camera. The image was the first of hundreds of works made by the American, in which she often pictured herself, nude or semi-clothed, in strangely distressed settings. Then, in 1981, aged 22, suffering horribly from depression, Woodman threw herself to her death from a high rise building in New York.

Against that stark biography, Self Portrait at Thirteen seems a portentous work and it had, admitted Watt, a mesmeric effect on the painter.

“It was produced by someone just out of childhood, but it is such a fluent, sophisticated image,” she said.

“It seemed from the moment of that photograph her whole life was set. Everything she did afterwards was camouflaging, concealing, hiding herself and yet she had done that from the very beginning. To have consistency of vision is a very difficult to achieve.”

Watt, 45, is one of Scotland’s finest contemporary artists. Born in Greenock, she excelled at Glasgow School of Art and won the John Player Portrait Award in 1987 while still a student. More recently her prodigious talent was recognised by a two-year residency at London’s National Gallery. It speaks volumes for her international reputation that Hiding in Full View follows perhaps her most prestigious commission, earlier this year, from the Uffizi gallery in Florence.

The new show comprises six works, all of them pattered by rich swirls of cloth that evoke the female form, with varying degrees of sexual charge.

She has not painted figures for years. Instead each of these works takes its contours from some aspect of a Woodman work, though Watt cannot pin down a precise reference point in any one photograph.

“It’s not as linear as that," she said. "It’s hard to tell me exactly. I don’t think painting is necessarily about conscious thinking. You have these long periods in the studio where you are unaware of time passing. That’s the way it happens for me - when you stop and look back, that's when you being to think about where the painting might go."

Two of the new works, Shoal and Fount, have a power that still baffles the artist herself though she has lived with them for months. “There is a darkness in that work that I can’t really explain,” said Watt, a “gothic quality” which believes shares with the photographer.

There is a something in these paintings that's defined by one of Watt’s friends as “concupiscence” — ardour or lustfulness — but which might be better described as a deep and dark eroticism. Complemented by six of Paterson’s 14 single-line poems they form an unsettling sonnet to the frailty of human life and love. One of the monostichs reads: “We don’t exist; we only dream we're here. This means we never die. We disappear.”

The artistic collaboration between poet and painterwas born when Watt first encountered Paterson after she had attended on of his reading at the Edinburgh International Book Festival a few years ago. He had stalked off to meet his public in the book signing tent, when she joined the queue of admirers.

“I thought I’d love to talk to him about his work, but it’s a difficult thing to do,” she says. “I was clutching a book of his poetry, and I spoke to him very briefly, but there was a massive line of people behind me. I said, ‘If you are in London, do you want to come into the National Gallery? I’ll take you round.”

A great friendship was born, along with the a creative partnership, which progressed from email converstaions, to regular meetings, as the Woodman project grew.

The two found they shared an extraordinary attention to detail. Painting for Watt is a lonely and labourious, which begins with her notion of the simple geometry of a canvas, and ends, some three months, in a beautifully proportioned work. Paterson approaches poetry, indeed the very arrangement of words on a page, with same obsessive verve.

That much is apparent from the book published to accompany the show. Watt is inordinately proud of it, not least because so admires Paterson’s attitude in its composition.

“Don was very particular about the typeface his poems were going to be in - his letters have to be round,” she said. “He didn’t want his Os to be flattened. I love that.

I’m obsessed with particular things in my painting, Don is obsessed with typeface. Its like Concrete Poetry. They are like artforms, the way they are placed on the page.”

Paterson, Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, is regarded by some critics as the best Scottish contemporary poet, but he can be a bleakly opague and difficult writer. Watt concedes that she does not understand all of his verse; sometimes though, “you just look at someone’s work and just get it”.

She went on: “I’ve always thought painting was analogous to poetry. It is a way of paring things down and editing, as a painter you are constantly editing what you see. Poets do the same thing.”

“Don’s poems are like looking at a truly great painting, because you keep going back to them. They can be awfully painful, but every time you go back, there is more to give.”

This is why they both like Woodman’s work so much concludes Watt.

“Some of her work is so raw, it hurts,” she said. “ You have to look away you actually can’ look at some of the images. I think when work affects you that way, you have to pay attention.” The same could said of Hiding in Full View.

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About Me

I've been working as a freelance writer since I resigned as Scottish features editor of the Sunday Times in January 2007, where I'd been for around three and half years. Prior to that I worked for five years for the Scotsman newspaper, where I wrote news, features, sport, leaders, opinion and diary pieces.
In a previous life I worked as a writer and researcher in a variety of fields including commerical video and museum design. I copy-edited the displays for the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and researched and wrote the Arsenal FC museum at Highbury stadium in London. I am a prize-winning history graduate of Edinburgh University.

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I have had published work commissioned by The Washington Post, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Irish Times, The Cape Argus, the Independent on Sunday, Scotland on Sunday, the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, the Scotsman and the Sunday Herald.